by Cynthia Price
Legal News
One of the delights of reading the newly-published book of short stories resulting from a writing workshop held at Western Michigan University-Cooley Law School this past summer, Lawyer Storytelling: A Sacred Craft, is that it reinforces the role of “story” in the work of attorneys.
Says Nelson Miller, the professor and Associate Dean of the Grand Rapids campus who led the workshop and edited the book, “I have to say, the workshops were a revelation to me about how critical storytelling is to lawyers. I think I appreciated its role for trial lawyers in opening and closing statements and the like, but even things so simple as a motion, an affidavit or an intake memorandum are really attempts to tell stories.”
In Miller’s afterword to the book, he states it differently. “When lawyers tell stories, they engage in what one of our workshop participants Anna Rapa, who practices federal defense, calls their sacred task, humanizing participants in a dehumanizing justice system.”
The humans in these 27 short
stories are another of the delights found in the book – people are there in their many variations, small triumphs, misunderstandings, warts and all. There is even an engaging non-human, an extraterrestrial named Sandra.
The variety of the pieces, written both in and out of the workshop, is remarkable. There is everything from a two-page stream-of-consciousness rendering of the thought process of a student about to take the bar exam (complete with profanity) to a lengthy thriller involving a hypothetical attorney general who has gotten away with serial murder over decades.
The contributors include attorneys, students, WMU-Cooley alumni, and law professors. Their biographies in the back indicate that several wrote pseudonymously.
The workshops could be taken for credit as well. “Several students took the course as a directed study for academic credit. It entailed a series of workshops, each three hours long, but it also had an hours requirement that the students review the skill of storytelling as they developed their own stories, a critique of the stories of others, reading about identifying the characters and describing the tension that makes for a good short story,” Miller explains.
The workshops, held from May to July, also included appearances by published attorneys, including Bill Jack of Smith Haughey who has published several novels. They explicitly covered the ways in which effective storytelling improves the skill set of lawyers.
One student, Matt Levin, commented, “The experience was truly unique and inspiring, as is the collection. I hope it finds a wide audience.”
Levin, who was formerly in the world of politics and has two previously published books, has a story Lawyer Storytelling that takes a cynical look at what people will do to succeed in law school.
He is not the only writer included who has a history of previous publications, though many are in the non-fiction world. These include, of course, Miller himself, as well as the WMU-Cooley professors: Curt Benson, Mark Cooney, Tonya Krause-Phelan, David Tarrien, and several adjuncts.
Cooney, in particular, has been published many times. He was featured in the Grand Rapids Legal News for 8/2/17 because he is the writing professor who spearheads the law school’s Distinguished Brief Awards. He also is the editor in chief of The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing.
His short story, “The Smile,” is first in the book and one of its most outstanding. In it, his skill in writing is clear; rather than tell the reader what emotions the protagonist is feeling, Cooney engenders them in the reader.
Nelson Miller says that, for the most part, editing the book was easy with a couple of informative exceptions. “One was beautifully descriptive but it didn’t tell a story. I worked with the student to create the tension that makes for good fiction, and we went through five drafts. In another, the student lacked the context that’s necessary to make it real,” he said.
The stories cover a wide gamut of genres, including mystery, suspense, science fiction, inspirational stories, and some, like the one mentioned above about the bar exam, that are hard to categorize.
And there is plenty of humor. Mo Fawad, a blind student who was profiled several years ago in this paper as he was graduating from WMU-Cooley, tells about a perplexing female client who attempts to seduce everyone in sight... for a surprising reason. Near the end of the story, her husband attempts to grab his attorney with intent to do him harm, but the lawyer’s clip-on tie literally saves his neck.
The traditional stories are interspersed with tales told in the form of what Miller calls “traditional practice forms,” including transcripts, a draft complaint, intake interviews, and even an overheard referral.
“When you write up an intake memorandum, you’re discovering the story as you formulate what you’re going to do for the client,” Miller says. “You could just sit in court and you’ll hear the stories. The prosecutor and the defense counsel are telling the story differently... This is a fascinating illustration of the humanity of law practice. When you give some thought to briefs, depositions, all of that, you realize, oh yeah, that’s storytelling.”
The book was published by Crown Management LLC of Grand Haven, in August of this year. It can be found on Amazon.com for $24.95, or by contacting Dean Miller.
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